Autocross July 12, 2009 – The Last Event of the Season

After all the trouble I had at the last event, I decided I would do whatever it took to really know this course inside and out. A few days before the event I signed up to do course setup and printed out a copy of the course map. I looked over this course map a couple times a day before the event so I had memorized the course before even my first course walk. Add in setting up the course, and walking it three or four times, and I had no issues navigating this course. This gave me the confidence to really start looking ahead while I was driving. Looking ahead is one of those things were the more you do it, the more you can understand how much it helps you.

This was a well designed course; fun to drive and easy to follow. Notice there are two options for the slalom. All of the fast guys went to the left of the first cone, so I followed.

After overdriving the car at the last autocross, I knew this one should be all about getting the lines right. Before my runs I spent plenty of time studying the course and deciding exactly what line I wanted to take around every corner. I told myself that running the correct line was more important than trying to go fast, and it worked.

I had a much more experienced autocrosser riding with me and his first comment after my first run was that I didn’t have the bad habits most novices have. I wanted to tell him that just last month I had every bad habit imaginable, but I stayed quite while he told me where I could improve. He told me that my line wasn’t quite right in some places, for example on the first turn before the slalom I was hugging all the cones when I should have been driving away from them a bit in order to late apex the last one. He also told me I could drive the skid pad (the circle on the map) a lot faster. I had been driving it to keep the tires fairly quiet but he said that hearing a constant, but not to loud, squeal was a good thing. I took this to mean I shouldn’t worry as much about the noise the tires were making but instead think more about how I could feel the tires grabbing. When I could feel the front tires sliding I slowed down a little bit, if the tires were too quiet I sped up a little bit. His advice helped me drop 3.3 seconds from my first to my third run.

Somewhere on the course I found another ~.3 seconds on my sixth run, which allowed me to run a best time of 47.391. This puts me only 17.6% slower than fastest time of the day, which is great considering I was 21.2% off of fastest time of the day the last time the autocross was held at SPC.